Blood on Lines Crossed
by Fadingsilverstar16
Summary: Clint and Natasha are creatures of routine.


Welp, looks like this movie hit me right in the feels like everyone else! I come bearing some Clint/Natasha for you. Hope somebody out there enjoys.

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_Blood on Lines Crossed_

Clint's a careless douche when he can afford to be, but somehow he knows from the start that all of Natasha's cosmetics go beyond hideously expensive when they don't need to be. Technically, he doesn't need to be here either; her nails are going to turn out perfect no matter who does them since that's just the way it goes. But he'd had enough of training and lounging and tinkering with his new(er) explosive arrows three hours ago, and his brushstrokes are always as neat as the shots he puts through people's eyes.

He would call it a gift, but really, he's just had a lot of practice.

"Spill it and die," she warns him anyway. He can't see her face from behind her issue of _Vogue_, but all these years of knowing her would be for shit if he _couldn't _tell that she's raising her eyebrow at him regardless. The magazine's a year old and Natasha knows nearly every word and picture by heart, but it's good for hiding the way her lips twitch when he blows on her big toe in response, pretending to accidentally brush a finger across the ball of her ticklish foot.

He's not past spilling the polish just to spite her, she knows, just a drop on her bedroom carpet here and there, but he never has.

The color's like blood, of course. As red as her lips and their ledgers, or so they'd call it if they were feeling melodramatic enough. But today's just a Tuesday and he isn't Hawkeye and she's not the Black Widow, so the color's just red even though the bottle reads "Ruby Clarity", because there was something liberating about not having to read into the details.

"You still haven't paid me back for doing this so damn much, Nat..." he grumbles, even though he absolutely knows that getting to call her Nat is his reward. Tony ended up limping for a week when he tried calling her that in the training ring that one time.

"Getting to spend time in my presence isn't enough?" She flips a page of her magazine. "Also, sex is for weekends."

This time, she doesn't even need to see him to know he's pouting.

"Yeah, but technically head-"

"Is for Fridays. And I hope you mean _my_ head, because your head is whenever I feel like it. Which could be in two months or maybe fifteen minutes, but don't get your hopes up."

And then he's grinning like he's won, she knows.

"I always mean your head, Nat."

Natasha considers shoving one of her freshly painted toes in his mouth, just for the way he says that, but Clint's kinky, the bastard, so he'd probably start sucking on it or something nasty and the head thing would become more than just banter. Instead, she inhales and shifts on the edge of her half-made bed, turning her right ankle so he can get at her middle toe better.

"Back to work," she orders, and he obeys.

It stays like that, for a while, with him concentrating like he's doing something far more worthy than painting nails and her trying to focus on Vogue, on the pictures and text and not the cool of the polish seeping through into her skin or the way his callused fingers feel on her feet and huh, she might just have to goad him into a massage, later.

He's just finished both of her feet when it occurs to her that they're possibly having a _moment_ or leading up to one, and the fact that she's _not _scared that they're having moments more and more often these days actually... scares her. Love's for children, and Clint is one (_and maybe she is too, because what else would you call what they're doing now?_), but it's easy to ignore when Natasha's not being directly confronted with _moments_.

Otherwise? Sex might be a friends with benefits thing and they just don't talk about the cuddling, but they still have lines to cross on love, and _moments _are those times when it looks like he might take the leap. And somehow Natasha knows (_she always just knows_) deep inside that he'll never speak the three magic words, when that time comes, but whatever it is, whatever he does, it'll show it well enough.

He'll definitely be the one to close that distance, too, since she's always been the smart one.

The magazine's holding on to her interest by a thread, but she flips the page and scans the fashion tip columns anyway. Her thoughts are more than enough to get lost in now, something she only saves for days like unimportant Tuesdays, and the moment he takes her left hand and starts polishing is the moment her eyes catch the word "summer" on the page and then she remembers how this happened. All of it, the origin of this routine of theirs, this thing that they do and forget about until they do it again (_like sex like training like missions like everything_).

The first time he'd done this had been in the summer, down in lovely Buenos Aires where the mission was to slip a little dissolving pill into a drug lord's champagne at some party. As the display piece (_always a display_) the Black Widow been the one to do actually it while Hawkeye watched from the air vents, of course, and it had been so blazing that going in close-toed shoes would have brought on more stares than she needed. And somehow, sometime, somewhere in a cramped little hotel, she found herself curling her hair and smoothing her lips with gloss as he gently blew on her feet like now. A moment, just one, wedged somewhere between a million other moments she couldn't keep track of, but a moment nonetheless.

To save time, they'd agreed.

And it had, cutting a clean ten minutes from their preparation and getting them out of Buenos Aires within three hours, which has got to be some sort of record, all things considered. How it had stopped being only a time-saver and started being _this_, though, she can't even begin to recall. It just... happened.

Like lots of things happen, Natasha guesses. Like training, like missions, like sex. Like the way Clint's hand lingers a bit too long on her left one before releasing. Like the way he seems to summon a misguided boldness as he takes her right hand, ghosting his lips over her knuckles before the red soaked brush comes down on her again. Like how she just goes ahead and lets him do it.

Natasha is the Black Widow when she lowers her magazine, her face revealing nothing, but she nearly falters when she sees Hawkeye looking back at her, his face revealing nothing and everything, and she should be making an offhand comment about him really being horny right now.

Except she doesn't.

They look at each other for the first time in an hour, one moment wedged in many.

"Fury got you knocking heads tonight?" He knows the answer is no, but that's not the point. Smirking, the Black Widow retreats to spin her web and sleep for the night, leaving just Natasha to meet just Clint halfway because all of a sudden things are easy again.

"They tell me New York has good pizza," she says.

"Wow. Pizza? You must be sick of shawarma."

The nails on her left hand are dry enough, she thinks. Natasha reaches and tangles her fingers in his hair for a moment before pulling away.

"Just the word makes me nauseous. Now I need alcohol to forget," she smiles, and then takes a leap. "But if you don't finish with that polish and distract me with head in the next five minutes, I'm going to be too sick to go out."

To his credit, he does both in three.


End file.
